Richard BAQUIÉ 1952-1996
EPSILON 1986
Richard Baquié – a hero of the underground scene in Marseilles in the 1980s and 90s who died young – is present again at the Friche de l’Escalette, a place he knew well when it was an automobile wrecking yard, where he found so many of the spare parts that figure in his sculptures.
His oeuvre is complex: an apparent bricolage eminently conceptual but never cold or arid. It is rich with the poetry of Marseilles, his home town, its violence and its warmth, a syntax of hidden elements and childhood dreams.
Reflecting the disenchantment of the 1980s, Epsilon (1986) is an installation that recycles the carcase of a Renault 16 – the iconic family car of the industrial golden age that spanned the three post-WWII decades. It faces off with Zero, four capitals cut in a corrugated metal sheet, that echoes the void* and the poster-like inscription of the third work – a wall-piece which was once a yellow car door that reads: Rien juste la mémoire de la lumière, while a huge ventilator fan on the other side of the car sets the sculpture vibrating in a cataclysmic drone.
This major work was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1986 as part of the Angles of vision: French Art Today show.
With its comet-like swath of letters Epsilon is a neo-futurist statement that says something about speed and sensation, with the fan to remind us of the wind and its sound.
Marinetti** and his friends would have approved of its Futurist components: the use made of typography, movement, sound, light, sensation… which characterize several of Baquié’s works.
* Epsilon is used as a symbol in mathematics to designate an arbitrarily small quantity greater than zero.
** Marinetti was the author of the first Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 in Le Figaro. This artistic and literary movement, which emerged in Italy, rejected tradition and exalted machinery and speed. Other artists among its founders were Balla, Boccioni, Carra, Severini and Russolo.